The present invention relates to a process for the loading of a circular sheet pile feeder with sheet piles which are successively taken off a pallet, splayed and placed with the one splayed end to the splayed end of the pile on the loading table of the circular sheet pile feeder, as well as apparatus for performing the process.
The loading of a circular sheet pile feeder is generally effected in such a manner that the operator normally takes a layer off the pile being placed on a pallet and gives it a certain splaying by hand. The operator then places this pile layer on the loading table of the circular sheet pile feeder by resting it against the back end of the exiting pile and then repeatedly passes over the splayed end of the pile with an edged tool until the required splaying is obtained. This process is repeated in relatively short intervals, therefore, as a rule, an operator is continuously required for the loading of a circular sheet pile feeder. Furthermore, the splaying requires care and experience. Additionally, the lifting of the pile layers onto the loading table is heavy physical work, at least in the case of medium-sized and large sheets, particularly in view of the fact that frequently the loading table can only be reached over one or several raised steps.
In recent decades, the continued development of circular sheet pile feeders has consisted primarily of reducing the height of the loading table whereby either the accessibility of the separating table has become more difficult or, owing to the ascending arrangement of the aligning table, the sheet alignment has become more difficult particularly for large size sheets. Therefore, the circular sheet pile feeder has been replaced to a large extent by the flat pile feeder because the latter can pick up the sheets from a pile on a pallet and thus heavy physical work is eliminated for the operator and, on an average, an operator is only required for two to eight minutes per hour for the reloading. However, the increased use of thin paper for multicolor printing makes the process employing a flat pile feeder more difficult since the thin sheets are not as easily separated from each other and the pile surface can be very wavy. Therefore, when processing such sheets, the need arises more frequently to replace the flat pile feeder by a circular pile feeder but, as a rule, this step is only taken when it becomes necessary for reasons of economy.